The common thread I found among the religious, love, and political poetry we've been reading is the idea of exile, or "exiled, but not lost" (the last lines of EBB's "A Drama of Exile"). Certainly this is obvious in "A Drama of Exile" as Adam and Eve are exiled from idyllic beauty and peace. However, what they gain in exile is knowledge, creativity, and in this poem, love. In so many of the religious poems we've read, death is an exile, but because of the images of after-life, the exiled aren't lost--there's a way in which the dead can speak from their exile--in scary ways like "Bertha in the Lane" or ambivalent ones like the 'cloud' of witnesses in "The Runaway Slave in Pilgrim's Point", or protective ways like some of the angels in some of the other poems. However, the dead aren't the only exiles--the living are in exile, often longing for the release from life--Rossetti's "Dream Land" is one of these. Dying brings the speaker "home." In the love poems, the exiled are exiled either from or to love. EBB's being pulled by the hair in the Portuguese is not a picture of love being a "home"--it's unsettling. Certainly in "Geraldine" the speaker poet is sent into exile because of his love for the exalted Geraldine. Whether requited or not, love separates as much as draws together. In the political poetry, this idea is very easy to see--"Edith" is exiled from her culture, from church bells, and from her dead loved ones (though she's alive, she's the one in exile--isn't that what we mean when we talk about people joining others already dead?) This reflects Christian idea of being travelers and pilgrims on earth--we're the exiled, looking for a home. Certainly the Runaway slave is in exile as is the stranger in Hemans's "The Palm Tree", or the knight in "The Captive Knight". Religion, politics (and political events), and love all create boundaries, the spaces on either side of which are founts for creativity sprung from either transcendent beauty, or suffering, or the mundane. The discontent or anxiety of not being at "home" (very familiar to me these days) is productive, creative, though not always comfortable. Traversing those boundaries yields interesting perspectives.